Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Here's a poem that springs out of my aloneness after my children had moved away.

Nothing lasts

The big empty house is fullOf little ghosts that left penciledHeight marks on the kitchen door frameAnd hand prints on the walls.

In the upstairs bathroom a small specterStands in front of the sink, on tiptoe,Trying out nail polish. The small mouth is pursedThe eyes intent, the little hands unsteady,Dropping a small comment on the countertop.There it stays, hard and pink.

I scrub around it when I clean, being carefulNot to touch it, not to disturb such a wonderfulArtifact of a previous existence,But time is wearing it away.Soon it will be gone.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

You can't miss with a sunset, and a picture of the Bonneville salt flats is always impressive, so how about them both. That empty space in the front of the picture is salt. Caked, hard, flat, and huge. The line near the midline of the picture is six miles away.

Friday, August 7, 2009

In this series of blog entries, I want to celebrate beauty and truth as I see it. Generally, I'll be showing my own stuff, because no one else will, usually with a commentary. I want to start, though, with someone else's work.

My daughter Malynda is about to kick her art career off in, of all places, Istanbul, Turkey. I'd like to wish her all the best.

Let me share with you something she did for my niece. My niece, Terry Gifford, has started a foundation that, among other things, gives microloans to women in Bolivia. Here foundation is called SWAN (Serving women across nations), and you can find it at http://www.swanforhumanity.org/ Malynda was to do the logo for the foundation. Her first efforts were not blocky enough for a logo, but are so heartbreakingly beautiful that I appropriated them. I used one as the basis for the name of a sailboat, and sometimes I just look at the others. Here is one of the two versions of the swan that she did. It's a simple line drawing, but it is a nearly perfect depiction of love and protection.